Into the Grizzly Maze

Basically, a big grizzly bear kills people for 90 minutes. As the bear is played by Bart the Bear, I assume he's angry about that time he got suckered and killed by Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin in The Edge. That is a much better movie than this one, although I think that was supposed to be a suspenseful survival film, and this is more like a slasher horror flick.

Part of the problem is they have to make the bear ridiculously clever and sneaky. With The Edge, the humans had no real supplies, and other than Anthony Hopkins' character having read a book on wilderness survival, neither of them knew what the hell they were doing. A perhaps unusually fixated, but otherwise normal grizzly bear is really fucking dangerous to those guys. 

With this movie, you've eventually got a pair of brothers (played by James Marsden and Thomas Jane) who have been hunters and trackers their whole lives. Thomas Jane's character is married to a deaf conservationist (played by Piper Perabo) and sure, being deaf in a forest full of large predators is kind of dicey, but she at least knows what not to do in the woods. They have food, radios, guns, camping gear. 

So the bear has to become almost supernatural to tilt the playing field heavily against them. It catches people by surprise like it's Jason Voorhees, or the damn Predator. It waits until one character is crossing a wet downed log to roar, so the person panics, falls off the lops and rolls down a steep hill. Where they naturally impale their leg on a sharp branch. The movie even has a couple bits where you hear someone firing a gun off in the distance, and then they go silent. Yet it's somehow not very good at actually killing people. Either that or James Marsden has Wolverine's healing factor, because otherwise that bear should have killed him three seconds after he was on him.

(There's also some really shitty CGI in the climactic confrontation. They should have found another route to go that didn't require that, because it just looks awful.)

I'm not sure it's exactly clear why the bear is doing this. We see this one local guide has taken hunters into a protected area (with the sheriff, played by Scott Glenn and doomed the minute they mention he's nearing retirement) and they've killed a lot of bears so they can cut off their paws. The bear also kills a couple of dumbasses that sneak into an area to cut down timber illegally. But the bear also attacks other bears, to the point that all the radio collared bears in the area are literally fleeing to get the hell away.

Billy Bob Thornton's in here as another guide/hunter. He says it's nature being pissed about the poaching and illegal timber cutting. Except we find out he was once almost killed by a bear while in his sleeping bag, but stabbed it in the neck with his knife. Then when he got out of the hospital, he marched into the woods and just killed 20 bears. What the fuck he's doing lecturing other people about pissing off nature, I don't know.